Interested in graduate study? I am always interested to hear from enthusiastic students who wish to pursue a PhD in my research areas of interest. I am particularly interested in students with a sound mathematical background and who are interested in a mix of theory and application in the general area of machine learning.

PhD students in my group tend to come from a diverse range of backgrounds. We have had students with degrees in physics, applied mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, and economics in the group. A computer science undergraduate degree is not a strict requirement to join my group or to get a PhD in the department (some extra coursework may be involved for students who are missing some of the required background). I also have joint faculty appointments in the departments of Statistics and and in Biomedical Engineering, so I can act as PhD advisor for graduate students in those departments.

Most of our projects involve modeling of real-world data sets involving time series, images, multivariate data from areas as diverse as text mining, Web data analysis, medical image analysis, bioinformatics, atmospheric science, remote sensing, and cognitive science. In addition, on the more theoretical side, we like to explore fundamental aspects of learning from data including mathematical and probabilistic analysis of learning algorithms and development of efficient algorithms especially for large data sets.

Here's how I suggest you can explore whether doing a PhD with my group would be a good match with your interests.

• Have a look at some of our research papers which describe recent projects in our group, which you can download from my home page. You may not understand all aspects of these papers, but you will get an idea of the nature of the research we do.
• Take a look at the Web site for our Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems - we have a large and very active group of faculty and students at UCI in the general area of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and this Web site provides lots of useful information and links.
• Visit the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences Web site to get a better idea of the Bren School overall. It is an exciting place, we have some very interesting research being conducted in areas like information retrieval, multimedia databases, machine learning, data mining, probabilistic reasoning, computational biology, embedded systems, and many more. This is a fun place to do research!
• Visit the main UC Irvine Web site to see what's going on campus as a whole. UC Irvine is a very forward-thinking university and an excellent environment for academic study and research. Check out the online newstand for the latest breaking news at UCI.
• Finally, have a look at the for information about our graduare program and the the PhD application and admissions process. Note the January 15th deadline. Each year we have award a large number of graduate fellowships to PhD applicants - it is quite competitive, but if you are interested please do apply!

If you have specific questions about doing a Phd in my research group, please feel free to email me at smyth at ics dot uci dot edu. My email inbox is usually overloaded with incoming messages but I will do my best to reply!

Last modified: July 2008